Detailed Description

That feature aims at synchronising the top of the Fedora tree with the current Boost upstream release. The current Fedora release is boost-1.50.0.

As of Fedora 13, the canonical sources used for the package switched from the official Boost release (with BJam build) to an alternate repository (with CMake build, for boost-1.41.0). That alternate repository has been deprecated and may be deleted any time soon (as of January 2013).
boost-1.41.0 has been delivered from that (now deprecated) Boost-CMake repository (hosted on Gitorious), where the code base had slightly diverged from upstream.

From Fedora 18, boost-1.50.0 was rebased back to Boost.Build v2, as keeping two distinct build systems sometimes conducted to two distinct binary distributions, for instance, when compared to Debian/Ubuntu deliveries.

Note that upstream Boost has decided, at the end of 2012, to switch to:

Work on rebuilding dependent packages in the tag, fixing any bugs it either the dependent package, or Boost

When most is done, re-tag all the packages to rawhide

How To Test

No special hardware is needed.

Testing of the Boost packages themselves requires the host system to have the boost-test package installed. Testing can then be enabled at package build time by passing --with tests. Note that that testing phase should be done only once per type of architecture and distribution version.

Integration testing simply consists of installing Boost packages on Fedora 19 and checking that it does not break other packages.

User Experience

Expected to remain largely the same.

Dependencies

There are a large number of dependencies for the boost package in Fedora. The list of packages that really _need_ rebuilding can be obtained as follows:

$ repoquery -s --whatrequires libboost\* | sort -u

Those are packages whose binaries will not even start after boost update, because each Boost update implies a soname bump. Currently this returns around 100 packages, with some of those being sub-packages of a single package.

Contingency Plan

Since we will build in a separate tag, if anything goes wildly wrong, the natural result would be abandoning that tag and shipping Fedora 19 with boost-1.50.

Note that neither API, nor ABI compatibility with Boost 1.50 may be assumed. Third party applications built against older versions of Boost will need to be recompiled, and may need to be patched to work well with Boost 1.53.